Are you ready to get real?

One of the most challenging things in life is to be truly honest with yourself.

As you are well aware by now, one of my favorite mantras is: Listen to YOUR body.

But, sometimes, your body’s signals are hidden from you. Unlike our smart phones and/or computers, your body often does not send you notifications until the situation is severe or too late. 

Your body is not like your credit card where if you try to make a purchase, your request is denied. You have exceeded your credit limit.

Your health is about prevention. The catch with prevention is that you have to initiate the action. You have to be proactive. 

The vast majority of Americans are crisis managers. For most Americans, the house has to be on fire before they take action.

High quality living

A quality life is about being proactive. As Dr. Stephen Covey wrote in his classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it is about Quadrant Two. If you have read this classic, you know Quadrant Two is important but not urgent. Quadrant Two is the Quality Quadrant. Quadrant Two is about investing in you and your future. Quadrant Two is about who you are when no one is looking. Quadrant Two is about loving and protecting your Future Self. Quadrant Two is about not only making it to 80 or 90 or older, but arriving there in good shape. Like the old joke, if I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.

One aspect of Quadrant Two, high quality living, is getting your blood work done every 3 or 4 months. Another mantra: blood results don’t lie. The blood tests don’t care. The blood tests are going to give you the current status of your body. So you can see, getting your blood done on a regular basis takes a certain amount of courage. Most Americans would rather stick their head in the sand. You know, ignorance is bliss. But that strategy risks getting really bad news with few options.

Heart disease, for example, is both preventable and reversible. Heart disease is caused by inflammation. You have control over the level of inflammation in your body. There are clearly defined and well-documented inflammation biomarkers. Getting a male or female panel every 3 to 4 months gives you real, objective, empirical feedback as to how you are doing. Do you have a straight A report card? Or are there areas where you need to clean up your act? 

It’s like triglycerides. If your triglycerides are under 100, that tells you that your body is able to handle the level of sugar (carbohydrates) you are eating or the level of sugar (alcohol) you are drinking. For your information, the average American’s triglycerides are 300 to 400. All we have to is look around and we can see that that level of triglycerides translates into massive obesity, an epidemic of type 2 diabetes and a steadily decreasing expected American lifespan. By the way, the highest triglycerides I have ever seen in my 44 years of experience were over 2,000. He was a 40 year old police officer who got off work and drink pint of scotch. Nothing will raise your triglycerides higher or faster than alcohol.  As I mentioned at the top of the prior paragraph, you want your triglycerides to be at least below 100. Where should your triglycerides be if you want truly high quality health? Less than 50. As I have shared before, my triglycerides are 29. And my HDL (good cholesterol) is 111. This is not luck. My father, as I have shared, dropped dead of a massive heart attack at age 46. My grandfather had heart disease. So my heart disease genes suck. But genes are not etched in stone. Genes don’t express themselves. Genes have to be turned on. What turns genes on are what are called epigenetic factors – translation – your lifestyle. Do you smoke? Do you drink alcohol? Do you over do carbs? What is your body fat? These are just a few of the lifestyle habits that turn on heart disease genes, for example.  

When I came home from Vietnam on a stretcher with an AK-47 gun shot wound in my right thigh in September, 1967, I decided I wanted to live. I went from smoking 4 packs on cigarettes a day in combat in Vietnam, to being a non-smoker by February 1968 and I have not smoked since. I have not had a drop of alcohol since 1979. I was single digit body fat for decades despite business travel of over 200,000 miles a year for 25 years. And I get my blood tested every 3-4 months without fail. I was born in 1944.

As we all learned with Covid-19, vitamin D is a crucial factor in how your body handles the virus and its variants. Overweight people, type 2 diabetics and those with low blood levels of vitamin D are the people most likely to die of covid or end up with long covid. Covid killed well over a million Americans. And today, millions of Americans suffer from long covid and will suffer it for the rest of their dramatically shortened lives. The Americans with major problems with covid all had blood levels of vitamin D under 20. 

My blood level of vitamin D is 116. How do I know that? I get my blood tested every 3-4 months. As soon as I saw that my blood level of vitamin D was less that optimal, I cranked up my intake of vitamin D3 until I was consistently over 100.

It is a simple process. Go to my Online Store. Order a Male or a Female panel respectively. When you see that you have deficiencies, increase your supplements accordingly. That is part of what my Ten most essential supplements is about. Get your blood tested every 3-4 months. Take your essential supplements every day.

As the saying goes: my program works if you work the program. How do you know the Joe Dillon program is working for you? Look around. How do you look compared to your family and friends? Your body does not lie. And to make your results rock solid, get your blood tested every 3 to 4 months, take your supplements every day with your JDD shakes, and walk with Heavy Hands at least 3 to 5 times a week.  

Thank you for listening.

As always, I wish you and your family the very best of health.

Joe

Top Photo by Harli Marten